Obscure Error
I was trying to reply to a comment on an article I posted to LinkedIn the other day and kept hitting the error “There was a problem sharing your update. Please try again”. Just a note to help anyone who might come across this error when attempting to post an update to LinkedIn, there is an unadvertised comment character limit of 800 characters.
A little help?
It would be great if this was made obvious somewhere such as in the error itself or at least somewhere on the site but even searching the Internet for “There was a problem sharing your update. Please try again” didn’t turn up much for me. It wasn’t until I opened a support ticket that I was given this info.
I hope posting this here will at some point in the future save someone from wasting the time I did.
Stephen Roughley - A Common Developer 
27 responses to “LinkedIn Error “There was a problem sharing your update. Please try again”.”
Thanks a lot! Can’t believe LinkedIn has such stupid pitfalls…
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What’s the minimum number of characters allowed?
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I was told by support that it’s currently 800 characters but that is subject to change I guess
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I ran into the same problem today. I had to go to the website the post originated from to make my comment, but I couldn’t do it directly from linkedin.
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Thanks for this! I just had the same silly problem and wasted ages on it, only in this case the word limit seems to be have been more like 500. LinkedIn had it right a couple of years ago, but in my view it’s losing it fast right now!
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usefull explanation but it did not help me, I reduced the text but the error message is still active.
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Brigitte: Keep on reducing! The group I was posting to had a stated limit of 800, but wouldn’t accept my post until I cut it into two posts of around 400 each, so I’m assuming their actual limit was probably 500. Maybe the group you’re posting to has “gone twitter”!
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I am at about 100 characters and get this error message
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If you get in touch with LinkedIn support they are pretty quick at helping with these sorts of things. Would be interested to hear the cause of your particular issue…
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Who has the time to deal with a tool that is so crude that it doesn’t give the reason for rejecting a response message?
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The LinkedIn iPhone app doesn’t have this 800 character limit. This error message also seems to be displayed if you reply to your own comment on the web version.
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Not 800 for me tonight, 700 was the limit
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Doesn’t always matter re: character limits – i.e. 800. I posted a TED Talk video – no go. same message even repeating over three days. If I post ‘test’ it works. So, something in attaching a file (and not all files trigger this) cause this glitch as well as exceeding the character limits.
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Even including regression testing and translation, it would take very little effort relative to add a character count indicator, relative to LinkedIn’s valuation.
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Yes for me too, found that the limit was 700
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700 was the limit for me to.
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Thank you very much for posting this–I really appreciate it. The limit for me was 700 characters (including spaces).
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Thanks guys – i was getting really frustrated trying to post my comment and only found the solution after seeing your post. And LinkedIn really should fix this silly error and make it explicit..
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My comment can’t be more than about 400.
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I was posting a short sentence. It seems it didn’t like a particular image for me, changed the image and the post was fine!
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Thank you for sharing this info! This happened to me several times and had no idea. The most annoying thing is when I refersh the feed the article I wanted to post on dissapeared, this happened a few times.
God linkedin really is the worst designed site from a user perspective, I have no idea how no one made a better replacement yet !
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Thank you so much for posting this. I was completely flummoxed. Such a silly primitive glitch. LinkedIn had a Help page that addressed this problem, but now it’s a 404 error. I found reducing characters to 800 didn’t work — had to reduce to 700. You might edit your post to the effect that several people have experienced that.
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700 worked for me. It seems they’ve lowered it. Still dumbfounded why they wouldn’t take 5 minutes to update their programming to state the reason for the issue. Strange!
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Lovely, It’s an Hidden Fact..
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I had a similar problem with uploading a new article (blog) in LinkedIn. It finally worked, after I did a full reload (shift-F5). Apparently, some cookie blocked it. Afterwards, it was possible to upload and save it.
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For me the blocker was an attached PNG file.
Converted the image to JPG and it went through.
I’m interested if this “very informative message” has appeared after Microsoft acquired linkedIn.
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I keep getting this regardless of number of characters. It’s poor business practice that LinkedIn doesn’t provide a reason for the error (good UI guidance indicates to *always* provide a reason and a solution to users). They need to hire some good UI designers and editors to check that things are clear.
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